May 11 – June 8, 2019

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unused, undone, etc., perhaps

NEW WORKS BY CASLON BEVINGTON

Over the course of the past year, Bevington has accumulated a collection of photos of windows and surface entryways. She captures these throughout New York or stumbles upon them through digital means. This practice builds an extraordinary archive while relaying a deeper interest in quantifying memory so as not to forget what one has experienced. Bevington describes that this process as created, in fact, an absence of meaning rather than an excess of it. The entryways function as means into or out of buildings only in the context of their larger built structures.

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Bevington works with, as she has described, “some paradoxical space caught within the image.” She mosaics her images, transfers them onto transparencies, and then suspends them in polyurethane. After being transitioned from recognizable medium to the uncategorizable, these photographs can no longer be regarded as such. This fall into limbo is central to the experience of Bevington’s work, and it asks us to consider whether nothingness is a state of being or whether it is a space to be filled by everything. This is what makes each viewing of unused, undone, etc., perhaps highly subjective and self-exploratory.

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Bevington’s prioritizing of material and her conjuring of primordial feeling places her work in a longer tradition of intellectually-driven artists including Carolee Schneeman, Eva Hesse, Penelope Umbrico, and Ceal Foyer. What makes her entirely distinct, however, is that as a very young artist, she was born into a society already inextricable from dependency on information technology and mobile electronic use. The works refuse the slickness of new gadgetry. In one instance, the text from a Craigslist ad floats ghostlike in the collage of transparencies. The tomblike orientation of Bevington’s works replicates what she sees through the screen of her iPhone.

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In witnessing the works in the gallery, however, you might notice how they sway in the doorway’s springtime breeze, exposing a malleability of form that reminds of the human body. This uncanny reminder of life is but momentary. Says the artist, “You are both too inside & too much outside to fully access. There is no depth or destination, instead friction, surface, superficiality; the soft displacement of the conscious self relating to the [my] experiencing body.”

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